Fighting for My Idols: The Value of Gamified Voting System on Social Media Platforms

Abstract:

As social platforms continue to play an increasingly important role in people’s daily lives, the question of how to motivate platform users to actively engage becomes a vital challenge that requires attention from platform managers. In this research, we collaborated with Asia’s largest microblogging platform to explore strategies that can effectively stimulate user engagement. Besides the core twitting functionality, the focal platform offers a unique feature named “Communities,” akin to Twitter’s communities concept, which provides users with tailored spaces to convene around shared interests. Drawing upon the media system dependency theory and social comparison theory, we designed and implemented a large-scale field experiment on the platform, in which we introduced a gamified voting system into the Communities, enabling users to advocate for their idols and compete on a public leaderboard. Utilizing a difference-in-differences analysis, we show that the introduction of the gamified voting system effectively incentivizes users to create more content and interact more with other users on the platform. The impact is particularly pronounced among highly active users (compared to inactive users) and devoted fans (compared to non-devoted fans). More interestingly, we uncover a salient, positive spillover effect to neighboring Communities where the gamified voting system is not implemented. We discuss both theoretical and practical implications arising from these results.

(Manuscript available upon requests)